Did Kernighan and Pike call them selves “software developers” ? No. They call call themselves programmers and wrote a book titled, “The Practice of Programming“. Those guys wrote UNIX. Similarly, is Tom Christiansen referred to as a programmer or a software developer? What about Linus? What about Larry Page? Those guys are all programmers.

John, on the other hand, is a mere cog in the machine at some mediocre corporation, where he’s working on a customer billing system that is neither brilliant, nor cheap… John is a “software developer”. Is that really the camp you want to be in?

Bob responds: Good points, and I have no objection to being known as a “programmer” — by real programmers. And I’d be honored to be called a “hacker” by a real hacker, or anyone who knows the difference between hacking and cracking. The problem is that my clients — the people who put bread on my table — have a different association with those terms than you or I do. That’s what I’m talking about here. I feel that getting them to accept the heroic image of the programmer is a losing battle. Also, “developer” and “development” send a subliminal message they can relate to, about the organic and holistic nature of architecting and building great software, whereas “programmer” sounds way too mechanistic to the uninitiated. I don’t want to position myself as a worker bee assembling standard pieces; I want to be seen as a professional collaborating with them, understanding their problem domain and their business needs in the process.